By Dave Anderson:
The Wednesday before the 2004 Election I wrote the following with only a mildly cynical pen:
the optimum time for the Bush campaign/administration to pull off an "October Surprise" by politically using terrorism as the excuse is on Thursday afternoon before the election because that gives the Bush administration the entire weekend to dominate the media cycle....
the timing would be good right now as there is a recent study that argues a terror alert raises Bush's approval levels by ~3% points for a short term bump of a week.
I guess I was a dirty fucking hippy for believing that the government would politicize national security after having only seen the examples of post-9-11, the rat-fucking of the Homeland Security bill and the rush to war. I was mildly wrong in that Bush and Rove did nothing, but Bin Laden release a tape that the CIA believed was a de facto endorsement of Bush and his idiocy over Kerry. I must have rolled around in patchouli to believe that the terror alert system was being used to manage fear and anxiety whenever Bush needed a distraction from a few negative news cycles during the 2002 and 2004 campaign cycles.
The great dirty hippie, Republican Gov. Tom Ridge basically admits that this was the case. Most prominently today as chunks of his book are being leaked:
and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
However he hinted that this was the case in 2005 as well:
The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
There was a strong suspician that the terror alert system and the leaking of 'intel' (some derived from torture and very stale as well as wrong) was leaked for political advantage. It is nice to have insider confirmation of the obvious, but again, as John Cole would put, trust the dirty fucking hippies because they got it right on instinct and experience. I also want to echo Teresa Nelson Hayden's great lament about the Bush Administration:
I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.
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